Crime (5 page)

“Mr. Abu Fataris,” said the prosecutor, “you must be aware of the fact that your statement incriminates Imad.”

Karim nodded. Shamefaced, he looked at his shoes.

“Why are you doing this?”

“Well”—he was even stuttering a little by this point—“Walid is my brother, too. I’m the youngest; they all keep saying I’m the moron and so on. But Walid and Imad are both my brothers. Do you see? And if it was another brother, Walid can’t end up in the can because of Imad. It would be better if it was someone quite different—I mean not one of the family—but it’s one of my brothers. Imad, and so on.”

And now Karim went for the coup de grâce.

“Your Honor,” he said. “It wasn’t Walid, honest. But it’s true, Walid and Imad look exactly like. See …” And he pulled a creased photo out of his greasy wallet with all nine brothers on it and held it out uncomfortably close to the presiding judge’s nose. The judge reached for it irritably and laid it on his table.

“There, the first one right there, that’s me. The second, that’s Walid, Your Honor. The third one’s Farouk, the fourth one’s Imad, the fifth one’s—”

“May we keep the photograph?” asked the court-appointed defense counsel, interrupting; he was a friendly, older lawyer and suddenly the case didn’t look anything like so hopeless.

“Only if I can get it back; it’s the only one I have. We had it taken for Auntie Halima in Lebanon. Six months ago, sort of all nine of us brothers together, you get it?” Karim looked at the members of the court to be sure that they got it. “So Auntie could see all of us. But then we didn’t send it, because Farouk said he looked stupid in it.…” Karim looked at the picture again. “He does look stupid in it, Farouk, I mean. He’s not even—”

The presiding judge waved him off. “Witness, go back to your chair.”

Karim sat down in the witness’s chair and started over again. “But see, Your Honor, the first one there, that’s me, the second one’s Walid, the third one’s Farouk, the fourth—”

“Thank you,” said the judge, exasperated. “We understood you.”

“Well, everyone gets them mixed up; even in school the teachers couldn’t tell them apart. Once they were doing this exam in biology class, and Walid was really bad in biology, so they …” Karim plowed on, undeterred.

“Thank you,” said the judge loudly.

“Nah, I need to tell you about the biology thing, the way it went was—”

“No,” said the judge.

Karim was dismissed as a witness and left the courtroom.

The pawnbroker was sitting on the spectators’ bench. The court had already heard him, but he wanted to be there for the verdict. He was, after all, the victim. Now he was called to the front again and shown the family photo. He had understood it was all about number two, that he had to recognize him. He said—rather too quickly, as he himself acknowledged later—that the perpetrator was “the second man in the picture, naturally.” He had no doubt that man was the perpetrator; yes, it was completely clear. “Number two.” The court settled down a little.

Outside the door, Karim was wondering meantime how long it would take for the judges to get a handle on the situation. The presiding judge wouldn’t need that much time; he would decide to question the pawnbroker again. Karim waited exactly four minutes and then went back, unsummoned, into the courtroom. He saw the pawnbroker at the judges’ table, standing over the photograph. Everything was going the way he’d planned. Then he burst out that there was something he’d forgotten. They had to hear him again, please, just quickly; it was really important. The presiding judge, who had an aversion to interruptions like this, snapped, “So now what?”

“Excuse me, I made a mistake, a really dumb mistake, Your Honor, just stupid.”

Karim was immediately the center of attention of the entire courtroom again. They were all expecting him to withdraw his accusation against Imad. It happened all the time.

“
Imad
, Your Honor, it’s
Imad
that’s the second one in the picture. Walid isn’t number two, he’s number four. I’m so sorry; I’m just all muddled up. The questions and everything. Please excuse me.”

The presiding judge shook his head, the pawnbroker turned red, and the defense counsel grinned. “The second, yes?” said the judge in a fury. “So the second—”

“Yes, yes, the second. You see, Your Honor,” said Karim, “we wrote on the back who everyone was, for Auntie, so that she’d know, because she—Auntie, I mean—doesn’t know all of us. She wanted to see us together, just once, but she can’t come to Germany, because of Immigration and stuff, you know. But there are so many of us brothers. Your Honor, turn the picture over. You see? All the names are right there in a row, in the same order they are on the front, in the picture. And when can I get it back?”

·    ·    ·

After they’d pulled slides of Imad out of the files and examined them, the court had to let Walid go.

Imad was arrested. But, as Karim knew perfectly well, he had stamps in his passport for both arrival and exit, proving that he’d been in Lebanon at the time of the crime. He was released again after two days.

The district attorney’s office finally brought charges against Karim for perjury and casting false suspicion on Imad. Karim told me the story, and we decided that from now on he wasn’t going to talk about it. And his brothers, as close relatives, could invoke their right to remain silent. The district attorney ran out of means of proof. In the end, all that remained was a strong suspicion concerning Karim. But he had gamed it all out in advance and couldn’t be charged. There were too many other possibilities; for example, Walid could have given Imad the money, or one of the other brothers could have traveled on Imad’s passport—they really did all look that alike.

Naturally, they still kept smacking Karim on the back of the head, not understanding that he’d saved Walid and defeated justice.

Karim said nothing. He just thought about the hedgehog and the foxes.

Bliss

Her customer had been in politics for twenty-five years. As he undressed, he recounted how he’d worked his way up. He had put up posters, given speeches in the back rooms of little taverns, built his constituency, and won three successive rounds of voting to become a minor member of parliament. He said he had many friends and was even the head of a committee of inquiry. Naturally, it wasn’t one of the major committees, but he was the head of it. He was standing in front of her in his underwear. Irina didn’t know what a committee of inquiry was.

The fat man found the room too small. He was sweating. Today he had to do it in the early morning; he had a meeting at 10:00 a.m. The girl had said it was no problem. The bed looked clean, and she was pretty. She couldn’t have been older than twenty, beautiful breasts, full mouth, at least five foot ten. Like most girls from Eastern Europe, she wore too much makeup. The fat man liked that. He took seventy euros from his briefcase and sat on the bed. He had laid his things carefully over the chair; it mattered to him that the creases not be messed up. The girl took off his undershorts. She pushed up the folds of fat in his stomach; all he could now see of her was her hair, and he knew she was going to need quite some time. But that’s her job, he thought, and leaned back. The last thing the fat man felt was a stabbing pain in his chest; he wanted to raise his hands and tell the girl to stop, but all he could do was grunt.

Irina took the grunt to be a sign of assent, and she went on for several minutes before noticing that the man was silent. She looked up. He had turned his head to the side, saliva had run onto the pillow, and his eyes were rolled up toward the ceiling. She screamed at him, but he still didn’t move. She fetched a glass of water from the kitchen and poured it on his face. The man didn’t stir. He was still wearing his socks, and he was dead.

Irina had been living in Berlin for eighteen months. She would rather have stayed in her own country, where she’d gone first to kindergarten and then to school, where her family and friends lived, and where the language they spoke was her own. Irina had been a dressmaker there. She had had a pretty apartment, filled with all kinds of things: furniture, books, CDs, plants, photo albums, and a black-and-white cat that had adopted her. Her life had stretched out before her and the prospect gave her joy. She designed women’s fashions; she’d already made several dresses, and even sold two of them. Her sketches were light and transparent. She dreamed of opening a little shop on the main street.

But her country was at war.

One weekend, she drove to see her brother in the country. He had taken over their parents’ farm, which excused him from military service. She persuaded him to walk to the little lake that bordered the farm. They sat on the small dock in the afternoon sun while Irina told him about her plans and showed him the pad with her new designs. He was delighted and put an arm around her shoulders.

When they came back, the soldiers were standing in the farmyard. They shot her brother and raped Irina, in that order. The soldiers were in fours. One spat in her face as he lay on top of her. He called her a whore, punched her in the eyes. After that, she ceased to defend herself. When they all left, she remained lying on the kitchen table. She wrapped herself in the red-and-white tablecloth and closed her eyes, hoping it would be forever.

The next morning, she went to the lake again. She thought it would be easy to drown herself, but she couldn’t do it. When she rose back up to the surface, she jerked open her mouth and her lungs filled with oxygen. She stood in the water naked; there was nothing but the trees on the bank, the reeds, and the sky. She screamed. She screamed until her strength left her; she screamed against death and loneliness and pain. She knew she would survive, but she also knew that this was no longer her homeland.

A week later, they buried her brother. It was a simple grave with a wooden cross. The priest said something about guilt and forgiveness, while the mayor stared at the ground and clenched his fists. She gave the key to the farm to her next-door neighbor, along with the few remaining livestock, plus all the contents of the house. Then she picked up her little suitcase and her purse and took the bus into the capital. She did not turn around. She left the sketchbook behind.

She checked on the streets and in bars to find the names of smugglers who could get her into Germany. The agent was practiced, and he took all the money she had. He knew that what she wanted was security and that she would pay for it—there were lots like Irina, and they made for good business.

Irina and the others were taken in a minibus toward the West. After two days, they stopped in a clearing, got out, and ran through the night. The man, who led them over streams and through a swamp, didn’t say much, and when they had reached the end of their strength, he told them they were in Germany. Another bus brought them to Berlin. It stopped somewhere on the edge of the city. The weather was cold and foggy. Irina was exhausted, but she believed she’d reached safety.

Over the next months, she got to know other men and women from her homeland. They explained Berlin to her, its authorities and its laws. Irina needed money. She couldn’t work legally; she wasn’t even allowed to be in Germany. The women helped her in the first few weeks. She stood on the Kurfürstenstrasse, and she learned the price for oral and vaginal sex. Her body had become a stranger to her; she used it like a tool. She wanted to survive, even if she didn’t know for what. She didn’t feel herself anymore.

He sat on the sidewalk every day. She saw him as she got into men’s cars, and she saw him in the early mornings when she went home. He had placed a plastic bowl in front of him, into which people sometimes threw money. She got used to the sight of him; he was always there. He smiled at her, and after a few weeks, she smiled back.

When winter set in, Irina took him a blanket from a secondhand shop. He was delighted. “I’m Kalle,” he said, and let his dog sit on the blanket, wrapping him up and scratching behind his ears, while he himself stayed squatting on some newspapers. Kalle wore thin trousers; he froze even as he kept the dog warm. Irina’s legs were trembling and she hurried on. She sat down on a bench around the corner, pulled up her knees, and buried her head. She was nineteen years old, and for a whole year no one had hugged her. She cried for the first time since that afternoon back home.

When his dog was run over, she was standing on the opposite sidewalk. She saw Kalle running across the street in slow motion and dropping to his knees in front of the car. He lifted up the dog. The driver yelled after him, but Kalle walked down the middle of the street with the dog in his arms, and he did not turn around. Irina ran after him. She understood his pain, and suddenly she knew that they were soul mates. They buried the dog together in the city park, and Irina held Kalle’s hand.

That’s how it all began. At some point, they decided to try to make a go of it together. Irina moved out of her filthy boardinghouse and they found a one-room apartment. They bought a washing machine and a TV, and then gradually everything else. It was Kalle’s first apartment. He had run away from home at sixteen, and since then he’d been living on the street. Irina cut his hair, bought him pants, T-shirts, pullovers, and two pairs of shoes. He found a job distributing brochures and helped out in the evenings at a bar.

Now men came to the house and Irina didn’t have to walk the streets anymore. When they were alone again in the mornings, they got their bedding out of the cupboard, lay down, and held each other tight, lying together, naked, silent, motionless, listening only to each other’s breathing, and shutting out the world. They never spoke about the past.

Irina was afraid of the dead fat man, and she was afraid of being arrested on illegal immigration charges and then deported. She decided to go to her girlfriend’s and wait for Kalle there. She grabbed her purse and ran down the stairs, leaving her cell phone forgotten on the kitchen table.

Kalle had ridden his bike with its little trailer to the industrial zone, as he did every day, but today the man who parceled out the work said he had nothing for him. It took Kalle a half hour to get home. As he took the elevator up, he thought he heard the sound of Irina’s shoes clacking on the stairs. When he unlocked the door to the apartment, she was going out the front door downstairs, on her way to the bus stop.

Kalle sat on one of the two wooden chairs and stared at the dead fat man and his blindingly white undershirt. The breakfast rolls he had brought with him were lying on the floor. It was summer, and the room was warm.

Kalle tried to concentrate. Irina would be put in prison and then she’d have to go back to where she’d come from. Maybe the fat man had hit her—she never did things without a reason. Kalle thought about the day they had taken the train out to the country. They had lain down in a meadow in the summer heat, and Irina had looked like a child. He had been happy. Now he thought he was going to have to pay. And Kalle thought about his dog. Sometimes he went to the place in the park to see if anything had changed.

Half an hour later, Kalle knew he’d made a mistake. He had stripped down to his undershorts and now his sweat was mingling with the blood in the bathtub. He had pulled a plastic bag over the man’s head because he didn’t want to see his face while he was working. At first, he’d gone at it the wrong way and tried to sever the bones. Then he remembered how you dismember a chicken, and he twisted the fat man’s arm out of his shoulder. Now it was going better, all he had to do was cut through the muscles and the fibrous tissue. At some point, the arm lay on the yellow tiled floor, the watch still on the wrist. Kalle turned around to the toilet bowl and threw up again. Then he ran water in the washbasin, dunked his face into it, and rinsed out his mouth. The water was cold and made his teeth ache. He stared into the mirror and didn’t know whether he was standing in front of it or behind it. The man facing him had to move in order for him to do likewise. When the water overflowed the edge of the basin and splashed down onto his feet, Kalle pulled himself together. He knelt back down on the floor and picked up the saw.

Three hours later, he had detached the various limbs. He bought black garbage bags in a grocery store, attracting odd looks from the girl at the checkout counter. Kalle tried not to think about what he was going to do with the head, but he was unsuccessful. If it stays attached to the neck, I won’t be able to get him into the trailer, he thought. There’s no way. He left the store. Two housewives were having a conversation on the sidewalk, the suburban train went by, and a boy kicked an apple across the street. Kalle felt himself getting angry. “I’m not a murderer,” he said out loud as he was passing a pram. The mother turned around and stared after him.

Back at home, he pulled himself together. One of the handles of the handsaw had come loose and Kalle cut his fingers. He burst out crying like a child; bubbles formed below his nostrils. He cried and sawed and sawed and cried, holding the fat man’s head tightly under his arm. The plastic bag had become slippery and kept sliding out of his grip. When he had finally detached the head from the trunk, he was astonished to find how heavy it was. Like a sack of charcoal for a barbecue, he thought, and wondered how charcoal had popped into his mind. He’d never cooked anything on a barbecue.

He dragged the biggest bags into the elevator and used them to block the automatic door. Then he fetched the rest. The garbage bags didn’t tear—he’d doubled them for the torso. He pulled the bicycle trailer into the lobby, where there was no one to see him. There were four garbage bags. The only things he’d had to put in his backpack were the arms; the trailer was full, and they would have fallen out.

Kalle had put on a clean shirt. He needed twenty minutes to reach the park. He thought about the head, about its sparse hair, and about the arms. He felt the fat man’s fingers against his back. They were wet. He fell off the bike and tore off his backpack, then just dropped to the grass. He waited for people to come running and start screaming, but they didn’t. Nothing happened.

Kalle lay there, looking up into the sky, and waited.

He buried the fat man in the city park in his entirety. The handle of the spade broke, so he knelt down and used the blade in his hands. He crammed everything into the hole, only a few yards from the dead dog. It wasn’t deep enough, so he trampled the garbage bags together. His clean shirt was filthy, his fingers black and bloody, and his skin itched. He threw the remains of the spade into a garbage container. Then he sat on a park bench for almost an hour, watching students play Frisbee.

When Irina got back from her girlfriend’s, the bed was empty. The fat man’s jacket and folded trousers were still hanging over the chair. She clapped her hand over her mouth so as not to cry out. She understood immediately: Kalle had tried to save her. The police would find him. They would believe he’d killed the fat man. The Germans solve every murder; you keep seeing it on television, she thought. Kalle would go to prison. A cell phone was ringing endlessly in the fat man’s jacket. She had to do something.

She went into the kitchen and called the police. The men on duty could hardly understand a word she said. When they came, they looked into the bathroom and took her into custody. They asked where the body was, and Irina didn’t know what to reply. She kept saying the fat man had died “normally,” that it had been a “dead heart.” The police, naturally, didn’t believe her. As she was being taken out of the building, Kalle came riding up. She looked at him and shook her head. Kalle misunderstood, leapt off his bike, and ran to her. He stumbled. The police apprehended him, too. Later, he said it was fine, that he wouldn’t have known what to do without Irina anyway.

Kalle remained silent. He had learned silence, and prison didn’t frighten him. He had been there more than once already—break-ins, thefts. He’d heard my name inside, and asked me to take on his defense. He wanted to know what was going on with Irina; he didn’t care about himself. He said he had no money but that I had to take care of his girlfriend.